150% Hike in AIDS Blood Tests Reported as Fear Spreads Among Heterosexuals

There has been a sharp increase in the number of people showing up at government-sponsored blood testing centers around the country to learn if they have been infected with the AIDS virus. As a result, at some centers, including the one in Los Angeles, people must wait as long as six weeks for an appointment.

From California to the East Coast, these testing sites have experienced an increase of up to 150% since Jan. 1 in the number of people seeking testing.

Officials attribute the growing demand to increasing publicity about the threat of acquired immune deficiency syndrome to heterosexuals.

“We had 112 calls on Wednesday, and today we are telling people it will be April 15 before we can schedule them for a test,” said Jackie Gelfand, project coordinator for the Edelman Health Center in Hollywood. San Francisco’s center said it had a three- to four-week waiting period for an appointment.

In Orange County, the number of people showing up at the testing center in Santa Ana also has jumped--from 359 in December to 527 people in January and 754 people so far this month, according to county AIDS coordinator Dr. Penny Weismuller.

Despite the increase, she said, there is no backlog. People are tested the same day they apply and get results within 10 days.

In San Diego County, the number of people tested in the four county-run test sites also has jumped dramatically--from 350 in December to 571 in January and 650 so far in February.

The blood test, provided free, reveals whether a person has been exposed to the AIDS virus but not whether that person will actually come down with the deadly disease.

With federal and state funding, 31 testing sites were established in California in 1985. These so-called alternative testing centers were founded in hopes of deterring people from going to Red Cross blood banks and posing as potential blood donors when they only want to have their blood tested for AIDS infection. With the growing bottleneck at the centers, Red Cross officials are worried that their blood bank testing capabilities will become overburdened.

There are two such centers in Los Angeles County: the Edelman Center in Hollywood and The Center in Long Beach. The Center said the number of people seeking the test jumped from 100 a week in January to 252 this week.

Gelfand estimated that by the end of April, the Edelman center will be doing 1,000 tests a month--up from 500 in December and 600 last month.

“They range from street people to businessmen to professionals to housewives,” she said.

Until recently, according to Gelfand, nearly 75% of the people seeking tests were gay males or bisexuals. She estimated that between one-third and one-half now are heterosexuals, half of them women.

Gelfand and Tom Dougherty at the Long Beach Center indicated that a “sizable percentage” of the newcomers are the “worried well,” for whom the concern is guilt for some indiscretion rather than membership in a high-risk group, such as gay or bisexual males, intravenous drug users or their sexual partners and heterosexuals who have multiple sex partners.

Russell Havlak, a public health adviser at the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said Thursday that he has heard of similar upsurges in Colorado, Minnesota and Virginia. Asked whether there has been an increase in the number of people seeking testing from private physicians, he said a preliminary Minnesota study indicated that three times as many people seek tests from private physicians as from the government-sponsored centers.